The Yggdrassil Device
by Nightheart
Summary: The Gods have left earth, but they may have left thier toys behind. In search of another bridge, Jane investigates and ancient ruin in Norway. Meanwhile, after bringing his brother back to Asgaard in chains, Thor must deal with the aftermath across the nine realms as war with an outside race looms on the horizon. Odin plans to use Jane's journey through Yggdrassil for his own ends.
1. Chapter 1

**If I don't write it, it looks like it'll never get written and world-hopping is a specialty of mine (see: Bleach fandom fanfic "Chasing Shadows" for the proof in the pudding). So I'm giving in and joining yet another fandom. My other specialty is unpopular canon pairings so it looks like I'm par for the course.**

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Jane Foster was not by nature a suspicious person, she generally believed the best of everyone and they generally proved her right more often than wrong, so she felt generally justified in her overall faith in humanity.

_:However,:_ she thought with a frown as she ran over the numbers once more and they added up quickly and easily. Too easily._ :I think Darce might have been on to something with this one.:_

She'd gotten a sudden _urgent_ request from the science division manning the observatory in Tromslo Norway (of all the obscure, frozen-over, backwoods corners of nowhere!) to come and help them parse the data with some upper atmospheric anomalies they had been getting recently. Granted, unusual energy spikes and possible inter-spatial relations had been something of a specialty of hers for the last several years, but these supposed anomalies they were supposed to be studying weren't very... anomalous. There were some slightly migratory magnetic fields and the luminescent plasma had shifted a little bit, but nothing terribly out of the norm for this area and time of year. The most anomalous thing she'd seen so far had been some very small spatial radiation from a weak fizzle of a solar flare, but that was easily caught and corrected for.

_:Something's rotten in the state of Norway, and it isn't the fish,:_ Jane thought suspiciously to herself.

There was nothing here that could possibly account for a call in practically the middle of the night (interrupting a very promising line of research she might add) pulling her away from her lab and research with the promise of an enormously fat (_suspiciously_ so) paycheck if she'd just nip on over half way across the world and add up a few things for them. The money was too good for a poor woman like her who lived on cereal and ramen to walk away from, but that didn't mean she didn't find her mysterious benefactors generosity to be fishy as hell. The sorts of businesses that ran research divisions the size of the operation she was assisting with were generally all about their profit margins. In her experience this preoccupation with profitability general meant that those businesses were usually incredibly tightfisted with their research funds. It seemed out of character for a team that seemed perfectly capable of solving their own atmospheric data incongruities to fly in a relatively obscure specialist like herself half way across the world at enormous expense to the company pocketbook and not a whole lot of impact to their bottom line.

_:If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. There's got to be a catch somewhere. I don't like this,:_ Jane thought.

Added onto the inexplicable generosity was the slightly unsettling fact that everyone there seemed _so_ solicitous of her. It felt like every time she turned around one of the team members was asking how she liked it there and they hoped she was comfortable and if there was anything at all she needed she was to let someone know and it would be taken care of right away. It was nice to be treated like an honored guest, and she knew she was pretty easy on the eyes (add to that the cachet of being foreign) but Jane wasn't so famous even in this relatively exclusive field of research that her presence would excite the five star treatment.

The ingratiating hospitality she could shrug off with the thought that perhaps the Norweigians were just _that_ open-hearted and they wanted the new girl to feel welcome, what she could not shrug off however was the hotel room. It was a top of the line, five star resort-type hotel the likes of which she had once dreamed of honeymooning in back when she and Doctor Donald Blake had been tentatively discussing the future of their relationship. Her bedroom could have fit her whole lab in it and the bathroom alone was twice the size of her camper! She had five-star meals delivered directly to her suite with the implication that she was to put anything else she wanted directly on the tab and whoever was footing the bill for it would pick it up.

_:All of this on top of the enormous consulting fee?:_ Jane thought to herself. _:I don't buy it. It feels like I'm being manipulated somehow but I can't quite tell how or why or who's doing it, though I have my suspicions about that last one.:_

Anyone else would probably be so overjoyed at a free vacation on top of more money for a weeks work than they saw from a grant in two years. Jane however had recently been a victim to a faceless organization that thought it was more than perfectly allowable behavior to march themselves into her laboratory and steal her lifeswork like the Grinches Who Stole Christmas of astrophysics! So seeing this much money being thrown around made her more than a little bit wary about how much power someone would have to back up all of that money and what precisely they wanted to bother with a relatively small fry like her over it.

_:Those jackbooted SHEILD thugs have got to be involved in this all the way up to their shiny little sunglasses somehow,:_ she thought.

She would never have seen any of her research again, and would have had to start all over, if it hadn't been for Thor nipping her notebook away from their thieving clutches and then later bargaining with that sunglasses-wearing bastard Coulson to get all of her stuff back.

_:I could have forgiven SHEILD if all they ever took was just my data, after all, I have all the end product in my head anyway,:_ Jane thought to herself.

But not a month after everything had gotten back to normal and she, Eric and Darcy were on to a _very_ promising trail in their work indeed when that smug, pasty little bandit and his band of suited cohorts had come riding back into her life and stolen away her Eric! She _needed_ him! And they'd just up and absconded with him like the jackbooted little thugs they were. They wouldn't let her talk to him, everything was top secret, he couldn't even hint at what he was working on, and the one and only time they'd let them meet he'd been pale and unshaven and sunken-eyed, like he hadn't been getting enough sleep.

_:Those insouciant, pushy... I just hope they're not keeping him chained in a basement somewhere parsing out particle data until his ears bleed!:_

He had tried to reassure her that he loved his new line of work and everything he was doing (that he couldn't talk to her about) was so fascinating that he lost track of himself but Jane didn't like it one little bit. Yes, Eric had always been just a little unkempt but it was sort of the nature of the beast, once hot on a lead, all the little details took a back seat to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Still, even with interesting new research, Eric had always made time for her. He and her father had been colleagues and best friends, and Eric had always been like a much-loved favorite uncle to Jane, a surrogate father, a friend, confidante and mentor. Jane could not forgive that faceless, heartless SHIELD for stealing such an important part of her life away from her, not while she was still so troubled by missing another as well.

_:Maybe I should have gone with them instead,:_ she thought with a twinge of guilt.

SHIELD had originally tried to offer her a position with them but there was no-way she was working for some faceless, nameless, mysterious entity that no-one held accountable and just felt like they could ride roughshod over anybody they wanted to just because there was no sunlight in their dark little corner of the government. She didn't trust any of them so she turned them down. Forcefully. And ignored them when they persisted. She wanted nothing to do with them. A month later they'd taken Eric on a tour of their facilities and he'd promptly dropped her, and all of the work they'd done together, like a hot rock.

_:Stupid SHIELD and their fancy research facilities,:_ Jane grumbled resentfully in her thoughts.

Part of her couldn't blame Eric for going with them, but she missed him. There was another she missed just as much... which seemed odd when Jane thought about it logically. She had known Thor for barely a fraction of the time that she'd been under the guidance of Eric, it was strange that his absence in Jane's world would be as great as someone who had been there with her through thick and thin for her whole life.

It had been maybe three days, and she'd spent fully half of that time figuring that he was a certifiable nutcase, but even now she couldn't deny that she'd felt inexplicably drawn to him... even when she'd thought he was crazy.

_:It doesn't hurt that he's really, __**really**__ easy on the eyes I guess...:_ Jane thought with a small inward twinge.

But physical attractiveness alone didn't explain all of it. In everything aside of her research Jane was the sort of woman who tended to play things safe for the most part. She didn't even have any parking tickets (and after having spent her college years in new york that was a certifiable bragging right)! There had been something about him that had made her want to help him even if the things she ended up doing were more reckless than she usually attempted.

_:I laughed more when he was around than I had in what felt like a very long time to me,:_ Jane recalled.

That was actually saying something. A very small part of Jane's tenacity when it had come to her research had been simply a desire to bury herself in her work to help her get over a good old fashioned heartbreak. The middle of the desert in Arizona was about as far away from New York as she could get a research grant for and still remain within her feild of study. She'd still had Donald's clothes for crying out loud... with the name-tags still on them! Even months and months after The Fallout Jane had still compared every man she'd come across unfavorably with her ex-boyfriend right up until Thor had come along.

:In a basic mental comparisson, one would think the Thor I'd met in the desert would have come out the sure loser. I mean, from all that anyone could tell he was a homeless man wandering the desert naked and either crazy or delusional or both.:

No job, no identity except one that no-one in thier right minds would buy for a second, no prospects, and nothing to call his own not even any clothes on his back.

She'd come to care for him in a very human sort of way, loved the kindness she found within him. True she had always found his strange naivete to be a bit odd, but also to be charming in its own way. There was certainly nothing childlike about him but his incongruent ignorance of basic things about her world had made her laugh (even as they unsettled her from time to time). She couldn't precisely pinpoint when her feelings for him had deepened; when he had gone from "that crazy guy out in the desert that she felt guilty for hitting with her car and therefore as responsible for as a pet owner who takes in a stray" to "the person I know I could trust with anything, who respects me for my strength and who is kind if not always observant, and chivalrous if not always entirely mannerly, and who always wants to protect the people around him."

Jane had always thought the whole macho lets go out and fight and let the weaker ones stay at home was an outdated relic of the past and belonged that way. Thor had managed to make her see the other side of the argument and he'd done it with actions rather than argue endlessly about it. For Thor it wasn't about prowess or glory or power or any of that, it was to sacrifice ones self by stepping into the path of danger in order that it should be averted and others too weak to defend against it would not be harmed.

She didn't love him because he was handsome or charming; lots of men were handsome and charming, she didn't even really love him because he was brave or honest, many others were brave and honest as well, and it certainly wasn't because he was some sort of demi-god-like being from across the stars. He had won her heart for good and all the moment he had ordered her to get those who could not defend themselves to safety and had stepped right in front of the destroyer, begging it to take his life and spare everyone else (of course she was horrified a brief second later when it did as he'd asked). She loved that he was handsome and charming and brave and honest but she most loved his human side; the man who had given her notebook back and apologized for not doing more, and who had been in pain and on the brink of death but been relieved that she was safe.

_:And come hell or high water, I'm going to find a way to make it back to him,:_ Jane thought.

The one reason she might have entertained the notion of working for that faceless, probably conscienceless organization SHIELD would have been that they had access to better equipment and technology. Those toys however, Jane knew, would have come with a price. That price would have been that any new discoveries that she'd made about the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, _they_ would have had immediate access to, and even _worse_, would have been the ones to decide precisely what should be done with it. A military organization like that would have one thought about what to do with any powerful discovery Jane might make... weaponize it. Jane was a pacifist at heart, she believed that science should only ever be for the benefit of all people. She knew that Einstein had always deeply regretted that much of his work had been used to develop a way to murder people on a scale unknown to the world up until then. Jane couldn't stand the thought of any of her work being used to hurt others. That was why she wouldn't go anywhere near SHIELD or allow them any form of access to anything in her computers or her notes. She couldn't use the best toys, but Jane figured she was far from being out of options.

_:Both my father and Eric always told me to try the harder path first, and if that doesn't work, then look at my other options.:_

Working for SHEILD would have been the easy path, and to her mind it would have been the wrong one. Working for a military organization with no control over how her work was used was not at all the sort of way Jane wanted to cross the stars.

_:I'm __**far**__ from out of options...:_

It had been the chance remark by _Darcy_ (of all people!) that had led Jane down her current, and very very promising trail of research. She had said that if Thor's people had been to Earth then it was quite possible that the relatively primitive earth culture they'd contacted had worshiped them as deities. The knowledge that a theory was now a given fact had led Jane to think that since the Asgardians clearly had been to earth they might have left something of themselves behind, some form of technology that resembled magic, and if _that_ were so then there was a possibility that this "magic" could enable her to reconnect with the other world. Jane fancied herself more of an active sort rather than some princess in a tower waiting to be rescued or whatever. Something must be preventing Thor from keeping his word and returning to her, if that was the case then she would just use her lifeswork to go and visit him (and earn herself a nice, shiny Nobel Prize in the bargain).

She'd carefully combed through the academic journals and postings that might loosely pertain to what she was looking for, and the slush pile had been enormous. Archaeology in the field pertaining the ruins and Norse mythology could be a pretty strange end of the spectrum on the best of times... adding in any theory about _actual_ visitation from a being not of this world was simply begging for all the weirdoes to come crawling out of the woodwork! Most of them were crazies spouting off theories based on pseudo-science at best and fantasy on average. Trying to find a sane, rational person who was willing to look beyond the pale but still retained perspective enough to want to keep most of his findings rooted in provable fact rather than conjecture had been an odessy in and of itself. However, she had found such a person. Doctor Sven Oslo, an archaeologist who specialized in the study of ancient Nordic ruins and the application that their mythology might have been based on truth. He was currently running a dig site on the upper northern fjord-coast, just off an area called Senja. Apparently some heretofore undiscovered carvings had been found there, runestones carved directly into a cave that contained references in code to pieces of Norse Mythology, specifically, to the Bifrost Bridge. The scientific community scoffed when the archaeologist had approached them with his findings, but Jane had jumped at the chance to discuss his work with him. They had been exchanging emails back and forth for some time.

Doctor Oslo felt that some of the equations Jane had come up with in recent days hot on the trail of her own recent work would fill in the gaps that had come up with the strange way that the runes carved into the site were positioned. He had invited her to come and visit the site in the hopes that a fresh perspective from a feild utterly unrelated to the usual tropes of translation and archaeology might shed some light and allow them to break the code. In fact, Jane planned to cut her little working vacation a bit short and nip over to the dig site later that day. If Doctor Oslo's research was half as promising as it seemed, jane might well be on her way to creating her own Einstein-Rosen Bridge before the year was out.


	2. Chapter 2

Before Thor had been turned mortal and learned a few much needed lessons in humility, victory in a battle such as the one he had just fought would have been cause for a great celebration. He would have been paraded through the streets, his defeated enemies in chains behind him while his people cheered the name of their favored warrior-prince. He would have drank in thier praise and adulation partly as his due and partly as a confirmation that all he did and thought, his wild warriors ways and delight in battle, was the natural order of things. Now he knew better and this "victory" left a bitter taste in his mouth for a great many reasons. There would be no celebration, no drinking or merriment, in fact once he had finished the distasteful task of handing his brother over to the wardens Thor intended to find a quiet spot and _sleep_.

_:Everything about this is... all wrong,:_ Thor thought to himself.

His heart felt heavier than Mjolnir when it had judged him unworthy as he looked at his brother, bound and gagged like some sort of rabid animal, chained to the Tessaract. Thor could not help but sigh with regret. Despite everything he knew that Loki had done personally (and been responsible for), and despite the fact that he knew he would likely do even _worse_ things if let free to do so, Thor wanted nothing more than to sunder the chains and locks and restore his brother to the place he had always been, at his side.

_:At my side or in my shadow?:_ Thor wondered. _:I had always thought that I treated him well and fairly. I sought his advice when I could see no solution of my own, we fought together, played together, how did my little brother become this glaring stranger before me?:_

Had it been all Thor's fault? Was it something he had done, some way he had slighted Loki that had caused resentment to fester and poison his soul? Or was it the inevitable poison of power and ambition that had twisted him so? Thor had always thought he understood his brother, that he knew him better than anyone, even the Allfather. Now he was left wondering if he'd ever known Loki at all. Sometimes he wondered if _he_ was the one who had gone mad, or perhaps the universe had blinked and he'd stepped into some sort of alternate, nightmare-version of his life in which his intelligent and erudite brother had turned into a crazed, power-hungry despot... and Thor had fallen in love with a mortal he could not have.

When he was feeling despondent and selfish, he sometimes wished it had never happened at all... that he'd wake up in a half-full barrel of mead in a tavern somewhere with his three equally drunken warriors Hogun Fandral and Volstag beside him with Sif and Loki trying to drag them home. That he'd never been almost crowned and never decided to pick a fight with the Frost Giants, never been sent to Earth and turned mortal as a result, never had clearly spelled out to him the _abyssal_ depth of his priggish selfishness and immaturity. That he'd never met a woman of such kindness and compassion wrapped round a core of stubborn, gentle strength that there was no hope that he could do anything but fall for her. That he'd never found out that his brother would stop at nothing to win their father's affection, even destroy a race of people that he hated just for existing, never had to stop him by destroying his one way back to the person who'd claimed his heart. More importantly that Thor had never been sent back to that same world in search of his brother whom he'd thought dead, certain that he could convince him to give up his madness and return home, only to find that his brother was twisted and darkened by the poison of evil, possibly beyond all hope for recovery.

_:I know it is selfish and wrong of me, but there are days when i think i might have been happier mourning my brother as dead, rather than having to see what his hatred has made him into,:_ Thor thought. _:At least then there was peace of mind. I thought at the end when he chose to let go, he was acknowledging his fault and trying to make amends at the end. Now I find myself questioning even that gesture. Did he let go, knowing full well that he could use the other ways through the stars to seek out new allies and ways of gaining power?:_

Thor did not know, and had no way of knowing, for his brother would no longer confide in him. This was one homecoming that Thor had no intention of celebrating... unless that "celebration" involved drinking himself insensate for a day or three.

_:Ah, but that it a luxury I doubt I will be let free to enjoy. The fighting part of the battle is over, but father always says that this is where a king detirmines whether victory remains victory or is tainted into a defeat. In short this is where the politics begin.:_

Matters had moved too swiftly on Midgard for Thor to really contemplate everything that this latest visit to Earth had cost him. First of all, his brother would never be his brother again. Thor had lost his closest ally and dearest confidante. Loki was the clever one, how in the Nine Realms was Thor supposed to handle the political machinations and the intrigues of an immortal court without his top strategist? Even he knew that a "good heart" could only get a ruler so far before it became a liability. An adept and wily politician could twist and turn even the most obvious matter into something that didn't resemble itself in the least. Rebuilding a bridge became about a needless arms race, and wouldn't Asgard be better as a whole if they left the affairs of the other worlds to run themselves without interference? It was a debate that still raged in chambers and not even the Allfather could weigh in on the matter until all those who had a stake in the outcome had said their peace.

_:But perhaps that has changed now,:_ Thor thought._ :After all, the Allfather sent me to Earth to retrieve the Tessaract and Loki, and protect Midgard from his influence, it is possible that this was a maneuver on his part to weigh in on the matter.:_

That act might very well have been his way of demonstrating to his court that, despite all of the time that had passed since Asgard had withdrawn itself from the affairs of the other realms, the realm of Midgard at least was still very much under their protection.

_:If this is so, then there is a possibility that the bridge could at last be rebuilt,:_ Thor thought with the first positive feeling he'd felt in what seemed like years to him, but had only been a few days.

There had been so much going on when he had returned to Earth that he'd had to settle for the unfortunate son of Coul's reassurances that Jane had been maneuvered out of harms way. Being allowed to gaze at a portrait of her was far from what he had hoped for when he'd crossed over to their world but it was better than nothing. He was still a warrior and a prince of Asgard, and he knew that his duty came first... he could only hope that Jane would be understanding of it. He had written her a letter explaining himself in the brief time he'd had in between the end of the battle in Manhattan and when he had had to leave earth with his brother. He hoped that his brother in arms, the Captain America, would deliver it to her and answer any questions she had. He knew it wasn't much, and it seemed to him a very pithy offering compared to all he _wanted_ to give to her, but with matters the way they were, it was all he could offer right then.

_:There are times when it seems as though all I have done is bring trouble to her door,:_ Thor thought with a pang of guilt. _:She deserves much better than a man who cannot even keep one simple promise to return to her.:_

And he had broken it not once but _twice_. Granted, it was a sacrifice to ensure the safety of his realm and hers, but he wondered if she would see that as a prince it was his obligation to put his duty above his personal feelings. One of the things he liked best about her was that she saw who he was as a person rather than being dazzled by his title or his strength as many others before her had been.

Thinking of Jane, no matter how difficult it was in her absence from him, always seemed to give him a greater strength and hope than looking around him and wondering about the way things had turned out. A few short weeks ago it had seemed like business as usual, the endless rounds of feasting and drinking and merry-making that had occupied Thor and his four friends for centuries had palled since he had come to know Jane. He had gone for centuries in an endless stream, never questioning his life, his choices, his very rightness, and then in the course of a few days everything changed. His world was turned upside down, everything he'd ever simply accepted as being right was called into question, his eyes were opened.

Now a year later Thor looked around him and saw how fragile the pillars of the Land Eternal that he'd always accepted as being ever-constant, he saw not how precarious they could be. His father was a warrior of great strength, but that was not what he relied upon to keep his kingdom safe. Odin Alfather relied upon the power of his mind, upon his commanding charisma, his diplomacy and his ability to let other put thier faith in him and his own ability to be worthy of that faith in order to hold the Realm together. Thor now saw too the very grave danger that he'd opened Asgaard up to with his actions.

_:Had I been in father's place then, right now, I would have banished me too,:_ Thor admitted to himself.

Loki's actions with the Bifrost had been an act of aggression that had made not just the Frost Giants, but many of the other races Nine Realms, view Asgaard differently. The Vanir in particular, gentle pacifists that hey were, took a dim view of one race trying to wipe out the homeworld of another. They had not cut off all ties for Frigga still had kin among them, but both his mother and father worried about the diplomatic relations between their people's having cooled and become even more distant since the Bifrost Incident. The Dvergar, as usual, kept to themselves. According to his teachers, back when he had still been taking lessons, Svartalfheim, indeed all of the Nine Realms, had once engaged in a great deal of trade among the other races. They had once forged weapons and armor of such strength and beauty that to possess one was the mark of a fine warrior. According to his mother, they had closed of their borders since those days after Thor and Loki had been born. Rumor had it they were engaged in a conflict on their own world with some former allies of theirs. The Light Elves too, had closed themselves off from outside contact except for some polite diplomatic communications, busy presumably with their own internal affairs.

Odin and his mother both worried about Asgaard's standing with the other races. Frigga had foreseen war. A great war against invaders from a Realm outside of thier stars. Odin's ravens brought ill tidings to him as well, all but confirming the visions of Asgaard's queen. Even with the diplomatic relations with the Frost Giants at the worst they had been since the Winter Wars on Midgaard, Odin was trying to call together the other races for a council to discuss the outside threat. Frigga and Odin both agreed that the matter of the Chitauri invasion of Earh had but been the opening volley, the declaration, of an invasion into the Nine Realms held together by the branches of Yggdrassil. If the Nine realms did not meet and prepare now, Odin worried that they would not have a chance to do so later. Thor, as Asgaards Heir and thier finest warrior, had been put in command of Asgaard's defense force and given the command by his king to make them ready to face war when it came. Asgaard's king and queen meanwhile were trying to reestablish diplomatic ties that had been left to languish since the time of the Winter Wars, when Asgaard herself had retreated to her own borders (aside of, perhaps a few trips by a young Thor and Loki to stir up things on Earth on a lark).

_:All the races have retreated into isolationism,:_ Thor thought, knowing that his father worried greatly about what it would mean for the future.

To Thor, there did not seem anything terribly unusual about the way all the other Realms and races kept to themselves, but perhaps that was because of the times he had grown up in. Long ago, when his father was the age Thor was now, the worlds had traded and traveled freely with one another. He had heard accounts from the older generations that on Asgaard it had been just as common to see a Dwarven Armory or a Light Elf shop selling magics on a street as it had been to see a tavern or shop of Asgaardian sundries. That had apparently all changed after the Winter Wars and all of the races of the Nine Realms retreated back beyond thier borders. Now days, seeing a Dwarven smithy or a Elven tailor shop would be as unusual as a unicorn on Midgaard.

Odin saw a great danger in the way the connections between the peoples of the Nine Realms had drifted apart as each went thier separate ways, uncaring of the easy brotherhood (or something like it) that had once existed between them had disappeared.

_:And now the Nine Realms face war on an unknown front with an unknown enemy, and none of us are really prepared to face it,:_ Thor thought, knowing full well why his king was concerned over the matter.

A younger Thor would have thought "let the other Realms tend to themselves as they have been doing, should danger come to Asgaard I will be there to defeat it and bring glory!" But Thor after earth thought, "if the mysterious enemy targeting the Nine Realms gains a foothold in even one of them, it is a danger to all. Defending Asgaard is not enough, and there is no glory in allowing the slaughter of innocent civilians due to unpreparedness, war should be avoided or at least prepared for."

_:I will have to trust that Father can renew our connections to the other races,:_ Thor told himself. _:Perhaps they do not listen to him as they once did, but that does not mean they cannot be brought to listen again, even with their current attitude of wariness of Asgaard due to Loki's... Bifrost Incident. I will do my best to prepare my kingdom's borders to fend off threat. And I will pray that Loki is given a kinder fate than the one the Frost Giants would have of him.:_


	3. Chapter 3

The stiff wind off the helipad as the chopper he'd caught a ride with disembarked for its next location didn't help the already chill northern air feel any less chill. Down a sharp, battered fjord cliff another stiff wind blew off the northern sea. Norway; beautiful, but cold enough to freeze spit before it hit the ground. The summer months didn't seem like they'd be so bad, especially in the southern portion, but he'd bet that the winter months were nothing to laugh about.

He was a man on a mission, but it wasn't really ShIELD business. In fact he'd tacitly let it be agreed that the less the organization knew about it the better, his friend had told him that there was little love lost between the object of his little quest and the organization they were both allied with.

As both the nominal team leader (if anyone could lead such a team... it was more like the old adage about the inadvisability of trying to herd cats) and as a friend and battle-comrade Steven Rogers had felt it partly his responsibility to see to this himself. The demi-god had entrusted him with a piece of correspondence (could one call it correspendence if one did not expect a reply?) that was very important to him on a personal level. Thor was a proud man, a proud warrior, Steven could see for himself, by his stiff posture and gruff tone, how much it cost him in pride to ask for a favor, but ask he had for it clearly meant a great deal to him. He had come to thier world to protect it from his brother's machinations and he had done his duty as he had said he would but his duty called him to return to his home without delay... not even long enough for him to keep a promise he had made. Steven had known without Thor having to tell him that the promise had to have been to a woman, he could see it by the way his comrade had shuttered his eyes and tried to blank his expression but the traces of longing were still there. n fact they were more than traces, and Steven Rogers knew the signs, in fact could empathize for he saw them in the mirror if thoughts of Peggy ever crossed his mind.

So Captain America was now apparently a temporary delivery service. However, he could see why, out of everyone, Thor had requested that he be the one to deliver the news. Doctor banner, while technically a Doctor in the feild of science as she was, was currently in hiding. Natasha Romanov and Clint Black actively worked for, in fact were agents of, the organization that Jane Foster made no bones about not trusting as far as she could throw a building; so she wouldn't trust any news that came from them. Tony Stark was right out, there was no way in this world or any other that Thor, proud man that he was, would risk opening himself up to the irritating man's rapier wit, particularly to the inevitable well-meaning ribbing on the matter of his (probable) love life.

So Steven was the man asked to do the job and it was one he didn't really mind, though it had taken him a little farther out of his way than he had originally thought it would. SHEILD had lured the Jane Foster out of the way with a lucrative consulting contract at an observatory out in the middle of no-where Norway, with a very generous stipend and excellent accomodations.

:They should have just paid her an average salary and got her a room at a hostel instead of money enough to start raising alarm bells in any sensible woman's head and putting her in a five-star hotel without any explanation about why.:

He'd have gotten suspicious and done the bunk a lot sooner if it had been him. It had taken a little extra time, and some of SHEILDs resources, but eventually he'd managed to track her down to what looked like the freaking edge of the world. She had some kind of archaeologist friend she'd been in contact with and had emailed him to volunteer her help as a scientist and astrophysicist. Steve didn't see what the two feilds could have to do with each other, usually mathy-stuff and mythical-stuff stayed pretty far away from each other in the world of academia, separate colleges, completely separate curriculum (one was trivium and the other quadrivium) normally you wouldn't see a hard-core scientist associating professionally with an archaeologist because the two feilds just didn't have a whole lot in common.

Even after more or less leading the group nicknamed "the Avengers" there were times when he still couldn't quite seem to wrap his mind around things to encompass it all. The Black Widow was an excellent fighter and a lady of great intelligence (if not many words), Hawkeye was hands down the finest shot he'd ever seen and he did it with arrows! That was easy enough to pin down, they were both amazing in their ways, but normal enough comparitively. Tony Stark was a bit more of a stretch. A man in a big metal suit that could fly around and shoot a swiss-army-knife range of weapons at anything he targeted. Amazing, and a real edge in battle... it was a shame about the man's personality. Under that suit though, Tony Stark was still a man (a man with a glowing metal ticker in his chest, but a man the same). He wasn't quite as sure what to make of the last two members of the team. The first one was a harmless-looking scientist who morphed into a huge tank-sized himan tank. Redskull would not have taken Hulk on and hoped to win! The only thing Steve wondered at all when he couldn't avoid thinking about it was... where did all that body-mass go when the Hulk subsided? The last member of thier team was an honest to goodness alien from another planet that had once been worshipped there on earth as an actual god. Loud, cheerful, battle-loving Thor was, unbelievably, the ancient Norse god of thunder.

:We are kind of a crew of misfits, aren't we?: Steve thought to himself.

Even the ones who were, or could be, quasi-normal didn't really fit in anywhere else. Well, maybe Thor fit in at home, and he reckonned that Tony Stark made a place for himself whether the people around him liked it or not, but Captain America was a man completely out of step with the rest of the world, and Hulk... well, Hulk... smash.

After having spent so many years frozen under ice, he had developed a sensitivity to the cold so he was glad to get out of the chill drafts of Norway and step into the lobby of the safe, secure (secretly SHIELD-funded) research facility in Tromslo. He strode quickly across the lobby to the front desk only to find the polite security guard pinned down under the furious onslaught of a slightly buxom dark haired young woman wearing knitted everything.

"What do you mean gone?!" the young lady demanded, pinning the man with a stare as though he were personally responsible for whatever inconveninece the young woman was faced with.

"Just as I said to you a moment ago miss," the poor man behind the desk replied. "She finished the last of her work ahead of schedule, checked out of the hotel, cleared her account and... gone."

"Listen bub," the young woman said. "I happen to be a close personal friend of Jane foster and I happen to know for a fact that she was scheduled to work here at this facility for the next week."

That got his interest. It seemed that he and the young miss had a mission in common.

"You could try calling her," the man behind the desk suggested.

"Are you sure you worked with her?" the young woman demanded skeptically. "Jane never answers her phone. She's hopeless that way. I can't get in touch with her."

"Well with all due respect miss, that sems more your problem than mine. I have no control over wether your close personal friends who never answer thier phones decide to pick up and leave thier jobs early or not."

"Jane doesn't give up on shiney new science toys so easily," the girl muttered.

Seeing an opportunity to tail his quarry back to its nest by tracking an ally, Steven stepped in.

"Is there a problem here?" he asked, trying his best to look harmless and helpful both.

He heaved an internal sigh of relief when the girl looked up at him full in the face and she was only harmlessly cute. Even after having been exposed to them on a regular basis during his work with the chorus girls selling war bonds across the US as the "star-spangled man with a plan" and his painful love of Peggy, Steven still got insinctively nervous around women who were strikingly beautiful. Maybe despite all of his hard-won confidence there was still a small part of him who was still the skinny kid punching bag from brooklyn.

"No problem," the young miss huffed and stomped off. Steven hurried after her before she could get away, trying to frantically come up with something to say that would make her immediately trust him and want to help him out.

"Wait please!" he called after her, trying not to sound desperate.

He didn't have a whole lot of information on his target, Thor had been reluctant to talk about personal matters with him though Steve could tell there was just a tiny bit of the usual male sense of competiton involved with his reluctance to speak about his lady-love.

_:I heard Jane hate's SHIELD so that's definitely out,:_ he thought quickly. _:I don't think telling her "you can trust me, I'm a superhero" is going to win her over either... ha! Got it!:_

"I'm a friend of Eric's!" he yelled at her retreating back.

For a wonder, the young woman paused at the doorway and looked back at him. Behind her plastic-framed glasses she looked plainly suspicious. Steve knew he had a very small window of opportunity to get on her good side so he followed up quickly.

"Or, actually, we have another friend in common... he's uh, from outta town." Steven pointed to a nearby mural on the wall of the lobby depicting the milky way and other farious galactic and stellar formations. "Way outta town."

The suspicion toned down a notch but she was far from trusting him. Still, he might as well play the angle for what it was worth. The next line was so cheesy he coldn't believe he was going to say it out loud, but she was the only lead he had and it was important to get her on his side.

"He also does things that might shock you?" Captain Rogers said hopefully.

The girl stared at him for a long blank moment, clearly trying to make up her mind about him. FInally she said

"I'm having a bagel, or whatever they eat here in Norway that doesn't have any weird-looking letters with dots over them or slashes through them. I'll let you buy."

"Oh, uh, sure. Great. My treat," he said, a bit taken aback.

_:Another complaint about this new era I have,:_ he added mentally to himself. _:Is it just me or have the women gotten even stranger and more difficult to understand?:_

There was a little coffee shop in the tiny university-town that had sprung up around the observatory that had itty bitty coffee tables and served coffee so expensive it should be declared a crime. Steven had a plain cup of joe and a bagel while the young ordered a scone and something with a name that he couldn't even hope to pronounce. Steven added "weird coffee" to his ever growing list of things about the new times he couldn't quite figure out.

"I'm Darcy," she said with little preamble as they seated themselves at a tiny table that stood on ridiculously long legs with really high stools to match and Steve wondered why they couldn't just stick the table at the regular height and keep the short people in the world happy.

"Steve," he said with what he hoped was a pleasant look. "I won't beat around the bush, I'm looking for your friend too, Doctor Foster, that is. I have something I have to give her. I thought she was supposed to be at the observatory."

"You're with _them_ aren't you?" she demanded. "Are you some kind of undercover agent or do they just not trust you with suits and shiney black shoes yet?"

"Not exactly," he hedged. "I'm more like... an associate."

"I _knew_ SHIELD set that up!" Darcy said triumphantly. "I _told_ her that that contract was too good to be true! No-one offers that kind of money to unknown astrophysicists for a trip out to the back-end of no-where all of a sudden."

"Why'd she go for it then?" he asked, genuinely curious.

One of the few things that Thor had said about his lady friend was that she was clever, it seemed strange she'd fall for such an obvious ploy.

"She has a house she inherited from her father that she's having a hard time keeping up. Tony Stark's been buying up property in that area for redevelopment and there's been pressure for her to sell. The property values have been going through the roof since he started in redeveloping the neighborhood and Jane's just barely making the minimum payments. Luckily, rich as he is he can't claim emminent domain, well, not _yet_ anyway, and taking that job would give her enough money to pay up on her fathers old house for another year or two. Apparently it's been in the family for generations."

Steve was disappointed but not entirely surprised that one of Stark's "best intentions" plans had unintended side effects, the man was a genius and a good man under all that smarmy bluster of his, but his impulsiveness was bound to be his fatal flaw.

"I, um, I'm sorry to hear that, well, not about her being unable to make the payments but-"

_:Stop talking Steve, she probably thinks you're an idiot,:_ he ordered himself.

Same old problem as ever. This girl, however, hardly seemed to notice, or if she did, chose to politely ignore it.

"I have to admit I'm not all that surprised that Jane's not here," Darcy said, blowing on her coffee. "Just disappointed. And about our mutual friend, he's got really pretty green eyes don't you think?"

"But they're blue," Steve blurted out in surprise before he thought about it. "Unless you're talking about Doctor Selvig and to be honest i've only met him once and it wasn't really under, that is, his were blue too, or sort of greyish?"

A wide smile stretched across the girl's face.

"Just checking," she said. "A girl in a strange place can't be too careful about any random guy she meets, though I'm hardly defenseless. I took out a thunder god once after all."

Captain Rogers looked at her in surprise and wondered what he'd gotten himself into. The Hulk had had a hard time going toe to toe with Thor in straight fight. What was this girls secret? She looked ordinary enough, sort of college-girl chic with a strange mix of awkwardness and confidence.

"So, how do you know him?" she pressed.

"We worked together recently," he said honestly.

It didn't take long for the young woman to add a few things up.

"You're...?" she said, staring at him in shock. "You're one of them, the Av-"

Steve quickly made a shushing noise and signaled that she should keep a lid on it. After all, he didn't want to have to spend any more time than he had to dodging the press or anyone else for that matter. He'd leave that sort of thing to guys who liked it, like Tony Stark. having had experience with it as Captain America, he knew for a fact that he preferred to compartmentalize and have a private life that was separate from his work. Deep down he'd always thought of himself as a regular guy.

"Yeah," he mumbled quietly. "I was asked to find Miss Foster-"

"_Doctor_ Foster," Darcy corrected him. "She's pretty touchy about that."

"Doctor Foster then," he corrected himself gamely.

"Why didn't he see Jane when he was in the neighborhood?" Darcy demanded next, sounding personally affronted.

"Too busy saving the world," Captain America replied. "By the time we got finished with the alien invasion and getting that cube out of Loki's grasp, Thor had to get back home right away so there was no time for a side-trip. He wrote this on the ride back and asked me to give it to her."

Steven patted the interior pocket of his leather jacket and did a double take. There was no sound of crinkling paper but when he looked over at his new acquaintance he discovered that she was holding the letter that Thor had asked him to deliver. Holding it and trying to open it so she could read it.

"Hey!" he snapped, surprised and a little offended. "You shouldn't read other people's personal correspondence, that's a federal crime you know."

"Oh please," she waved him off. "You're not the US Postal Service, chillax."

Steven quickly snatched it back with a small frown of disapproval for her at her blatant invasion of another person's privacy and put it back in his pocket before she could finish tearing it open. Darcy crossed her arms over her chest and surveyed him through narrowed eyes but then subsided, clearly deciding it wasn't worth the bother of fighting a superhero over.

"So do you know where I can find Doctor Foster. I tried using the channels at SHIELD, but they couldn't tell me. They didn't think she knew anyone in this part of the world."

"That's because they don't have access to her super-secret email account," Darcy said smugly. "I thought she might be using the trip as an excuse to get free airfare over here, she's probably already neck-deep in her secret new project... Which totally explains why she won't answer her phone. She get's like this whenever there's star-science and math involved. Once she's in, you can't pry her away from her equations with a crowbar, well, unless you used it to knock her out but then you'd have to deal with her scary temper when she wakes up."

"What can an astrophysicist possibly find in Norway that has to do with her work but isn't at the observatory?" Steven asked curiously.

Darcy smiled, clearly liking the feeling of knowing something that a person involved with a top-secret world intelligence organization did not.

"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you," she said, clearly quoting something, but as usual the reference went right past him without a pause to rest.

"Well I hope it's where we're going next then," he said instead.

"What's with this 'we' all of a sudden?" Darcy demanded. "I just met you, and this is Jane's top secret baby that she does not, by the way, want SHIELD knowing about and stealing all of her notes from her again. How about you just give me that letter and I can give it to her next time I see her."

"No can do," Steve said with a shake of his head. "I said I'd deliver it personally."

"Aw come on, he knows me," Darcy pressed. "He'd totally be cool with it."

"It's a guy thing," Steve said reluctantly. "I came all this way for it so I want to finish this."

"Wow, there's some old fashioned values for you," Darcy said, shaking her head a little but she didn't look disapproving. "Well, I guess I could let you come along, but you have to promise you're not going to call in your SHIELD friends to rain on our parade."

"I can promise that I won't call in anyone unless its an emergency," he temporized. "So where are we going?"

"There's this dig site out in a place called Senja, and Jane's been exchanging emails with the head archaeologist there for the last few months."

"An excavation, as in archaeology?" he said, taken aback. "I thought she was a scientist who studied stars."

"She is," Darcy said. "But she thought she might have some luck looking back in order to look forward. What she said to me was 'the old gods have left this playground, but they might have left some of thier toys behind.' And it looks like she's had some luck with it, last time I got hold of her she said her equations were helping him and his team so they must be onto something."

Privately he wondered how much she could possibly be onto because astrophysics and archaeology just didn't seem like they would have much to do with each other. He thought it pretty far from likely that Jane Foster expected to dig up any wormholes in some mouldy old ruin at the end of the world.


	4. Chapter 4

It was a strange place to dig up a wormhole, this moldy old ruin at the end of the world. The place she'd worked in New Mexico had had its own sort of grandeur, the mountains in the distance were beautiful the endless stretch of desert in the other direction carrying it own stark appeal, the endless starry skies over the desert every night had captivated Jane, so different from her own home. The place she now found herself was just as beautiful, the long craggy stretches of mountains that literally _loomed_ on one side, and the grey seething mass of the north sea, churning and gnashing in irritable splendor against the fjord cliffs beneath her on the other side. She slowed the jeep to a stop and looked around her.

"Doctor Oslo," Jane said in a presuming tone as she climbed out of the jeep she'd rented for the day trip out to _beyond_ the back of nowhere in Norway.

If she'd thought Tromslo had been isolated, it wasn't a patch on the site where Doctor Oslo and his team of archaeologists were busy digging up the past. This place was bare rock; fjordland perched several stories above the north sea, and there wasn't a town for well over half a day away, and that tiny settlement was even smaller than Puente Antiguo in New Mexico.

"Ah! Doctor Foster!"

A spry, tanned fifty year old man with narrow features and pale white hair wearing cargo pants, heavy boots and the parka ubiquitous for the climate called, his face alight as he turned to greet her.

"I apologize for showing up so abruptly," she began but found her imminent apology for her precipitous arrival brushed aside with the heartiest handshake she'd had in a while.

"Not at all, not at all good Doctor," he said.

His grip was firm and he had an energetic aura about him, it was the same feeling that any one of her fellow scholars, researchers and academics got when they were deeply involved in the work that drove them. This man had a passion for historical discovery and he would work without ceasing to prove his theory, and now at last had his big break. Which certainly gave them something in common, different as their fields of researches were.

_:Sometimes I still wonder at myself,:_ Jane thought humorously.

As far as fields of research went, this was a stretch. Archaeology and Astrophysics were about as disparate as two branches of research could be. They were not even placed in the remotely the same track; with astrophysics being placed securely in the quadrivium heavy on the math and science, and archaeology being settled very comfortably in the trivium along with its languages, arts, and literature brethren.

"I must admit, I was surprised to receive your contact those many months ago," he said. "Now that we are meeting face to face I don't mind telling you I was very worried you were one of those half-crazed psuedo-scientists who spend rather too much time experimenting with questionable substances and not enough time creating a solid groundwork for their theories."

Jane gave a small half smile at that, not unaccustomed to it.

"But I am pleased," he continued. "_Beyond_ pleased, that I took the time to read your work Doctor. You have... that is to say... a number of your papers, the one on the space-bending properties of molecular harmonic resonance comes to mind, are quite brilliant, if unprovable."

"With the help of your research, Doctor, I mean to change that," Jane said with confidence.

Of course she could be confident, she was one of the few who knew that visitations by "deities" to earth in ancient times was a fact, and that interstellar travel was also a fact. Unlike the rest of the scientific community, she had more than mere faith in the unprovable to go on, she knew that they existed, and had seen it with her own eyes. For her it was all simply a matter of getting the numbers to align.

"I trust you have gotten the latest scans I've sent you, Doctor?" Doctor Oslo questioned. "I am most eager to see what you come up with. Your ability to decipher the code where our best linguists and cryptologists have failed consistently and for longer periods of time will get you sniped by some faceless security organization if you are not careful."

"I'll keep that in mind," Jane said, neglecting to mention that one secret organization had already _tried_ to recruit her, but after their way of being introduced she was not about to go and work for them. She strongly suspected that they kept an eye on her anyway.

"I hope you have not shared out your findings just yet," Doctor Oslo said.

"Naturally not, I would need to see the work in it's entirety before I could even begin to say whether or not my own contributions are a step in the right direction or if we're dealing with something else. I can't solve an equation unless I have all of the variables."

"Then come with me, please," Doctor Oslo said with a mysterious smile. "We have uncovered something... _very_ exciting."

On their way across the dig site to the place he intended to lead her, Doctor Oslo informed her that the ruins they had discovered almost, but did not _quite_, match the style of early and later Nordic ruins. The runes were xastly different for one thing, but so was the interior space architecture. It was as if, according to the doctor, the building was like an _eidos_, a perfect form, around which all later buildings of the style that the civilization was supposedly built around was an imperfect copy. The structure had been carbon dated as being pre-bronze age, but the sophisticated style of architecture with its arches, vaulted ceilings and domes carved directly into the rock and going down and down and down, did not match a culture that had not yet discovered the way of getting around the brittle nature of the stone they worked with. There was also a goldish-colored metal used in all of the fittings and hinges that had not corroded with the passing of centuries though they were right on top of the ocean. This and a number of other mysteries about the site baffled and delighted the archaeologists working on the site, trying to unlock its secrets.

_:I'm sure that's all very exciting from an archaeologists point of view...:_ Jane thought privately.

What interested _her_ however had been the sigils they'd found in the ruins. She'd seen samples of 'normal' runes, though from what she understood of norse culture, they had not been vastly enamored of writing things down. Dr. Oslo had explained to her that they had regarded writing as being more of a magical and religious observance than they had the mere function of recording things for posterity. Their culture had been an oral one with great respect being given to bards who passed down their stories in poetic _eddas_. The intricate and beautiful knotworks that illuminated every nook and cranny of the hallways looked different from the usual knotwork patterns she'd seen pictures of in books. It was different in a way that Jane could not quite define and one that nagged at her as being familiar.

Doctor Oslo led her through vaulted passages and grand staircases that spiraled down and down, deeper into the earth.

"How far down does this go?" Jane asked nervously.

As an astrophysicist, all of her work that was not done in the lab kept her out under the open night sky, recording and charting the movements of stars and atmospheric phenomenon, being underneath so much rock felt unnatural and made her extremely uncomfortable.

"The central chamber, which is where you will want to work I imagine, goes down into the the earth for three quarters of a mile."

Jane's eyes widened incredulously. It was difficult to build with that much pressure weighing on top of a structure, unless their builders had perhaps used an old, inactive hallowed out volcano caldera or something. Or, they really were an advanced race and had advanced _ways_ of making their architecture.

"We just passed the threshold that would put us under sea level now, it shouldn't be too much longer."

So. Not only journeying to the center of the earth but under the sea as well, this trip was getting better and better. Jane missed her starry skies already.

"I trust you will find this worth the trip, Doctor!" Doctor Oslo said with a flourish as he pushed open a massive golden double door (with a curious-looking inlay on the surface that Jane felt she had seen somewhere before) that swung open on silent hinges.

The central chamber was enormous. "Cavernous" was as close a description as she was ever likely to come to describing the sheer size of the enclosed space. The dome that arched overhead was a perfect dome, like an overturned bowl, exactly one-half of a sphere. The surface of the dome should have been the rock that surrounded them, but whoever had built the ruin (back before it had been a ruin) had chosen to coat the whole dome in that curious goldish non-corrosive substance that for all Jane knew might actually have been gold. The Surface of the dome however was not smooth...

_:A starry sky...:_ she thought in distant wonder.

It sort of vaguely resembled one a little bit at first, but only in that the things that appeared on the surface of the dome had no more rhyme or reason to them at first glance than the night sky did to an average layman. There were strange symbols inlaid all over the dome that glowed soflty, like reflective paint, and it looked like they were put all in a mis-mash with no thought put to placement.

"There would be some among my set who I imagine would like to compare this to an ancient Egyptian tomb, with the way they liked to write hieroglyphs on the walls and ceilings," Doctor Oslo said in a reflective tone. "But what I find odd is the other half of the room..."

"The other half?"Jane questioned looking around.

Doctor Oslo pointed, and Jane realized that she had been standing on a sort of step that led from the carved hallway back to the entry door out into the room. She then saw what he meant by "other half." The room was not a dome as she had at first surmised, it was a _sphere_.

"Is that..." Jane reached down a hand and flicked the substance to confirm it.

There was a splash and a ripple caught the light off the various lanterns (many of the floating-lotus variety, floating on the surface of the water) that dotted the chamber, spreading out until it caught the edges of a circular platform in the center of the room, rising slightly up out of the water on the floor like an island. What she had taken to be a shiny floor was in fact a still pond.

"How far down does it go?" she questioned.

"As far up as the dome goes from here I surmise, we haven't measured it yet. In fact, we have been keeping the discovery of this chamber very hush-hush, even on the dig site. Only ones who know about it are myself, my assistant and now you. I've let you in on it because out of everyone who received the small sample I sent you when you first contacted me, you are the only one who has made any sense of it."

Jane smiled a little shyly. It was so rare that she was praised by any scholar other than Doctor Selvig, her mentor, who thought she was brilliant but a little too willing to go out on a limb at times as she reached for the key that could help her bridge the gaps in her formulas. Of course Doctor Oslo would have tried as many different ways of cracking the code in his research as possible, Jane would have done the same.

"May I go and look at that central platform?" Jane questioned looking around for a boat or floatation device. "Or will I have to swim out there?"

Doctor Oslo smiled that mysterious smile of his again and confidently placed a foot out onto the water. The water solidified, becoming just like glassy-polished stone, though there were still ripples where his foot touched the surface.

"Kinda blurs the lines between science and blasphemy doesn't it?" Doctor Oslo said with good cheer.

Jane smiled and, because she had no problems with a little blasphemy, stepped out onto the waters surface and walked over to the island, musing as her feet made ripples without a splash.

In appearance the substance that the central island was made of reminded Jane strongly of the man-made stone opalite, it was milky-white but iridescent when looked at in the light, shining under the surface with a opalescence of rainbow colors chasing and blending was informed, when she asked, that there was no naturally occurring substance that matched up to it in any record anywhere, and Dr. Oslo was reasonably certain that there was not even a man-made substance invented that matched it. With a flutter of excitement that she tried to suppress in the name of scientific objectivity, Jane thought that the substance might actually be formed from an element that had not been discovered yet on the Periodic table. The symbols that were inlaid into every bit of surface had no discernible pattern at first, but Jane was sure that if she kept at it, she'd crack the code. Code relied on math, and she was good at math.

She couldn't read runes, she couldn't really appreciate a bunch of old ruins, but she knew her own formulas staring back at her no matter what shape they took.

_:Though I have to admit the form of them is really strange!:_

The other archaeologists at the site were excited because they all figured that the new type of runes that were carved along every surface was a new form of Norse writing, sort of like the Linear A tablets discovered (and as-yet undecipherable) Minoan written language. The rest of the team had been feverishly looking up every known writing system from the era in history looking for a cross-over or an influence but, nothing matched... Jane's theory was quite different.

_:Those "runes" are not runes at all of it, I'd bet my tiny, tin-can of a mo-ho on it!:_

When one had a presupposed numerical system (or even when one did not) math was a universal language, because every known thing in the universe was guided by its principles. Paring down even an element to its most basic, parts it came down to the push-pull of the energy that comprised the individual parts of each atom, and that too was math. Everything from the gravity between planets to the atoms that held matter together came down to math, and Jane knew math no matter what form it was written in. She particularly knew this form of math, the ability to create a shortcut in the fabric of the universe, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

She looked around her at a cavernous dome that would make the great cathedrals weep with envy at its lofty heights, every single inch of which, the ceiling, the walls, everything was carved in perfect, indecipherable characters. None of the signs for what Jane's gut told her were equations were anything at all like what she used. There was no plus or minus, the most basic concept of mathematics, she could not decipher which of the sigils might stand for a number and which might be the signs used to manipulate that number but that wasn't going to stop her. She'd simply set aside the preconceived notions about what a number was, and what it was used for, to concentrate on trying to understand a language written by a people who thought of characters as being both a unit to communicate meaning and a spell with its own magic unto itself... written by a people for whom magic and science were not separate.


	5. Chapter 5

Thor sort of wondered at himself, or rather at his former self, who had thought that he was more than ready to be Asgard's king. He could now easily see that he had an incredibly long way to go yet before he was ready to lead his people as they deserved to be led. Battles and victories were his forte, but it would be far better if, as his father said, only preparation was neccessary and never the war. In order for that to happen, Thor was going to have to get a lot better than he was at reading people and anticipating thier reactions.

_:I had thought that the Jotun might have come to sign a peace treaty, for instance,:_ he thought to himself, now knowing that the thought had been a hopelessly naive one.

The Jotun had come for reparations for damages done to their world when Loki had unleashed the raw power of the bifrost on the surface of Jotunheim. According to the emissary that the Jotun had sent, his attack had leveled their largest city, killing not thousands but an estimated millions. Their capitol was a smoking crater, and it was only the necessity of the Jotun holding a moot to decide upon their next king after the death (or rather, assassination) of Laufey, their former king, that had held off a full scale war such as had not been seen since the old days.

_:I had thought that Loki would come back to face Asgardian justice, but unless father can find a way to negotiate different terms for reparations, the justice he will face will be the vengeance of the Frost Giants,:_ Thor thought, troubled indeed on behalf of his brother.

Perhaps he should have left him behind on earth, but that thought was problematic in a number of ways. First, the warriors he fought alongside were strong, but earth lacked the sorts of facilities that could hold in a being like Loki. Second, if Loki were to get free, Thor had a number of soft targets there defenseless against his brother's retribution. Third, leaving Loki on earth would not only all but guarantee that he would eventually slip free and cause trouble for the native population (as well as Thor's friends), leaving him on the relatively defenseless planet would probably be a bad idea in that, were there any forces left of the Chitauri or any of thier allies, they would see Loki's relatively defenseless position as an invitation to launch an invasion using him as a pretext for that invasion.

_:See Thor?:_ he thought to himself with a grim humor. _:No problems reading the situation on a battlefield... I just need to think of politics as a differnt sort of battlefield.:_

The emissaries were demanding weregild of course, but that was only the opening volley. They wanted their Casket of Everwinter back, and they wanted Loki, alive preferably. Thor rather doubted that last preference was because they wanted to lock him away, more likely they'd do something _unspeakably_ terrible to him. Thor wished that the population of Asgard was a little more up in arms about handing over their second prince to their ancient enemies, but sadly, the general consensus of the civilian population seemed to be that Loki had made his choice and should live with the consequences. The older warriors, the one's who had fought against the Jotun under his father in the Winter Wars long, long ago, privately approved of Loki's actions, but the younger crowd, Thor's contemporaries and those born after peace had come to Asgaard, were sickened by the bloodshed and desired only peace.

_:A year or so ago I would have berated them all for going soft and squeamish,:_ Thor thought.

Part of him still sort of felt that way, that maybe his people were willing to pursue appeasement with the Jotun as a way of keeping their precious status quo at the cost of their pride, but while he did not want to hand over his brother to the vengeance of the Frost Giants, he also could not deny that his brother had made his choices, over and over.

_:There was a moment, I could have swore I almost had him. I could see the fear and desperation in his eyes.:_

It had been on top of the metal man's building, when he had fought his brother and tried, yet again, to convince him to give up his army, his pointless struggle and come home. Thor had said that he might be forgiven, even by the people he had wronged if he would just join Thor and fight alongside him as his brother once more. They had locked gazes, and Thor swore he saw his little brother begging him for help, for a way out of the mess he'd put himself in and Thor had felt a surge of hope that maybe this time he'd gotten through and Loki would join him and they'd be brothers again...

_:And then he stabbed me in the side with a shiv,:_ Thor thought, his shoulder slumping forward once more in remembered pain. The shiv itself had been small, and hadn't really hurt that bad, what had hurt was his brother's rejection of Thor's offer.

_Sentimentality_, his brother had said, cool ice forming over his features.

_:As though caring for another people, not to mention one's own family, were some sort of weakness,:_ Thor thought, still trying, after all of this time, to reconcile himself with the changes in his brother.

_:Why won't he let me help him? Why won't he let father or mother help him? Why doesn't he __**see**__ how much we care? I just don't understand why he can't see that, despite everything, he's still family to us?:_

He knew that since Thor had brought him home, bound and muzzled like a rabid animal, both of their parents had been to see him on multiple occasions to try to talk sense into him. Though he did not know the content of those conversations, he could see the results in the continued and increasing strain on the faces of the Allfather and his mother. Both of his parents had always possessed the sort of ageless strength and beauty of a towering tree, they had never truly looked old to him until now. His mother looked thinner, and there were circles under her eyes from worry, his father... he looked tired.

_:It's bad enough that Loki has apparently taken leave of his senses, Asgaard is threatened with true war such as has not been seen since the Winter Wars thousands of years ago if we do not hand Loki, my brother, their son over to their terrible retribution.:_

Either alternative was unthinkable. Hand over Loki to a race of beings known for their barbaric blood-thirst and lack of mercy or beautiful, peaceful Asgaard becomes a battleground and its civilian population terrorized by the horrors of war.

_:The Allfather knows which choice to make,:_ Thor thought with a heart that felt heavier that Mjolnir had on that fateful night he'd tried to lift it and been found unworthy of her strength.

Loki was one man, no matter how important he was to Odin personally, the Allfather, Guardian Protector of Asgaard and all of it's people, _would_ sacrifice one person to hold onto the peace for millions and consider it a fair trade. Thor knew that this would be the choice that the Allfather would make, just as he knew that his father, Odin, would grieve terribly.

_:And mother...:_

There was no way that Frigga could possibly be expected to take the necessity with equanimity. Yes, she was Queen of Asgaard, and the peaceful lives of her people were important to her, but Loki was her favorite son. She loved Thor, yes, but their natures had never been similar. Thor had always been closer to his warrior father, though looking back now Thor thought he'd never truly understood the lessons his father tried to impart the way Odin had meant him to. Loki and Frigga were both quieter, more thoughtful. Or they had been. Thor was no longer quite certain what to make of his brother. He wondered if this choice that Odin would have to make would create a rift in his parent's relationship. Frigga loved Loki as much as Odin or Thor did, but Odin Allfather would have to do the hard and necessary thing in order to protect his people, Thor worried that, While Queen Frigga might understand the necessity, she would have a hard time forgiving him for it.

_:Or maybe their love for each other is strong enough to find a way to reconcile such a terrible choice,:_ Thor thought hopefully. _:It might take a little time though, even I am having a hard time accepting it, and I know for a fact that the Jotun are, for once, the wronged party.:_

The emissaries demanded weregild for the lives they had lost in the attack. It was an amount that even Asgaard, for all of its great wealth, would have a hard time coming up with the funds to pay. In fact, the sorts of taxes that the king would be forced to levy in order to pay the proposed amount would weigh heavily on every citizen. The price of peace would be a high one, and not only for the royal family but for every man and woman in the Land Eternal.

_:I wonder...:_ Thor thought, something occurring to him that had never before een crossed his mind.

_:Could they perhaps be attempting to use economic means to weaken us as well?:_

He'd never had such a thing occur to him before, but he had studied up on the more recent history of earth (partly in an attempt to hopefully have an easier time conversing with Jane when next they met) and much of the history of their wars, it had been shown that a nation that was poor and burdened with reparation was a nation that had a harder time raising an army for the defense of its borders.

If it had occurred to Thor it had certainly occured to the Allfather, who was canny in the ways of politics. Sadly the only thing that really meant was that surrendering Loki to face the Jotun's notion of justice was that much _more_ necessary. Odin might get them to come down on the price of weregild a little, thus not crippling the economy of Asgaard, but the concession of Loki would be cemented and all that much more important in exchange for the lenience.

_:They are also taking the opportunity to get their casket back,:_ Thor thought.

That, he knew, was a tremendous source of power for the Jotun. They had not had control of it since the end of the Winter Wars long ago, when Odin, victorious, brought it back and locked it away in the treasure vault of Asgaard. Thor was also pretty sure that the fact that Asgaard had the casket in their possession was one of the means Odin used to hold on to the peace treaty he had maintained with Laufey.

"It's strange to find you here," the familiar voice of his friend Fandral called out to him.

He was perched on top of a tower in the north corner of the palace, a place that afforded a view of the vast spread of the city before him, but one where the icy wind blew. Usually Thor did most of his thinking in the weapons room, while practicing the warriors arts, it was unusual to find him seeking silence.

"I am afraid I am not good company at the moment, friend," Thor replied with customary honesty.

"If you're worried about Loki, I'm sure everything will turn out alright," Fandral soothed. "Even if he took a little jaunt to Earth to play with the mortals there, the Allfather will forgive him. He wouldn't hand a prince of Asgaard over to our enemies!"

Thor had been commanded by his king to keep Loki's origins and recent activities under wraps for the time being. Even Thor's closest friends, Lady Sif, Fandral, Volstagg and Hogun thought that Loki had just nipped over to earth to have a little fun at the mortal expense like in the old days. Thor suspected that Sif was not fooled at all by the pretense, but she had always been a canny one, and her interactions with "King Loki" had been strained at best. She did not trust the younger prince any longer and once her trust was lost it was lost for good. Loki had made an enemy in her.

"I am afraid that matters are a little more serious than that," Thor replied carefully.

"So we'll pay the Jotun a little weregild," the blonde said with a shrug. "A few years with taxes, and everything returns to normal. No harm in that."

"And the Everwinter Casket?" Thor questioned him, curious about his answer.

"Let them have their silly little box. It's not like they are a threat to us, especially not now."

Thor grunted a little bit to himself. His friend's answer was exactly what his own would have been before he'd been turned mortal and had his world shaken up and turned upside down. Now he was more inclined to try to find a better path to peace than mere oppression of a weaker people.

_:Until I am invited by father to partake in the negotiations, I suppose there is little I personally can do about the matter. Best to let it rest for now, I'm certain father and I will discuss it at length before long,:_ Thor thought to himself.

The Allfather had taken his son even more into his counsel than he had before. Certainly Thor had always been the heir to Asgaard's throne, but when he'd been younger (strange to think of a breif two years as being "younger" but that was how Thor thought of it, his breif time in exile as a mortal had matured him in ways he was certain his father was relieved to see) his father had always been a bit reluctant to involve his impulsive and sometime arrogant son in the more delicate day to day politics of truly running a realm. Thor had been raised and groomed to succeed the throne, but he'd always only listened with half an ear to the "boring bits" and his father had likely known it.

_:He'd probably counted on Loki to know those sorts of things and for me to always take my brother's counsel on those matters,:_ Thor thought with a pang.

Now that he was wiser, and truly beginning to pay attention to everything he would need to know to be a wise and good king, the Allfather was adding in the parts of rule that Thor had not been so adept at before.

_:Now there will be no Loki to take up the slack on all the parts I am lacking in, so if Asgaard falls into trouble on my watch, it's all on me.:_

Thor's thoughts were taking an upsetting turn, and since he could do little about the matter, he might as well turn his attention to something else that was weighing on his mind, and it was actually something that his friend Fandral (who was a well-known ladies man) might be able to assist him with. It was a bit embarrassing to have to bring it up though. He supposed that no names needed to be mentioned.

"Perhaps not," was all Thor said on the matter of the Frost Giant's casket. "There _is_ a matter you could offer an opinion on though."

"I'll help however I can, you know that," Fandral said easily.

"Suppose you were a woman," Thor said.

"Ah! Women! My area of expertise!" Fandral said, delighted.

"And a man gave you his word he would return to you and he did not," Thor continued. "But then, a while later he visited near you and did not go to visit you... how do you suppose a woman might react to that?"

"Hmm," Fandral said with a wince and a slow headshake. "An average woman? Not very well my friend, not very well at all. Women take a dim view of a man who will not keep his word. And technically, this fellow did not keep his word to her _twice_, once when he would not see her, and again when he was near and did not visit."

Thor slumped forward again, dejected. He'd been afraid of that. Still, there was the note he'd wrote her. Maybe she would be understanding about it.

I wrote- er, ah, suppose the man wrote her a letter explaining that there were extenuating circumstances?" Thor said hopefully. "The man had a greater duty."

"Well," Fandral said after a long moment. "It might depend upon the woman in question. She might forgive a lack of communication if there were no way to talk with her, but if that man jilted her twice chances are his ship is sunk. Is she an attractive woman?"

"I find her to be very attractive," Thor replied honestly.

"And does she live in a small village or a large city?"

"A small village, what does that have to do with anything?" Thor asked.

"Then this poor sod's goose is cooked," Fandral said decisively. "He might have stood a chance if she were in a place where there were a lot of other attractive women about, more competition you see, but if she's a rare commodity in a limited market, the competition over her will be fierce. If there's nothing holding her to that letter writer but a broken promise, most women would decide that she could be better treated with another."

"You think so?" Thor said glumly.

"It only makes sense," Fandral nodded. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason," Thor said, dejected at having something he'd very much feared all but confirmed by his friend.

It had been over a year, and mortals reckoned time differently from a being who could look forward to seeing centuries. Until he had become mortal himself and knew he could count his lifespan in mere years or even days, a decade or two here or there had been without meaning to him. Jane would not have years to waste waiting on a promise from a man who had broken it not once, but twice already. A year was probably already more than generous considering that mortals bloomed and withered like flowers in comparison to an Asgaardian, and that year represented a large amount of time to Jane Foster. It had been a long amount of time for him too. Before he'd been mortal then returned home, a decade was of little consequence and days were an eyeblink, even years were not of great importance overall. In this last year however, it had seemed to him as though he'd felt every day drag on with an impatience rising in him to get it over with in hopes that the next day would bring him something better. The time of grief he'd spent mourning his brother and keenly feeling the absence of the woman he'd come to cherish had seemed longer than all of the previous centuries of his life put together.

_:Heimdall says that she searches for me, but how much longer will she be content to turn her eyes to the stars instead of looking around her to see what else is offered?:_ Thor wondered pensively.

The Bifrost had not even been started due to politics, and even if construction began on the morrow, it would be a labor of many years for the construction of an artifact of such immense magical power and surprising delicacy was not something that was achieved easily.

_:And I would not burden my father with a selfish request to travel to earth just to visit her,:_ Thor thought, the burden of his own self-restraint settling heavily upon him.

He wanted to visit Jane, of _course_ he did! But Odin Allfather's power was not limitless, in fact he had taxed his strength almost to the breaking point manipulating dark matter to send his son to earth the first time to retrieve his other son and the lost Asgaardian treasure just recently. Thor would not risk his father's health, let alone the vitality of his king, on anything less than a truly dire, world-shaking emergency. He could not ask, not and remain true to his duty as a subject of Asgaard and a loyal, caring son.

_:Besides, if I asked father to risk himself and he did so to fulfill my selfish wish... if something happened to him I would never forgive myself. And mother... what would she think? She would understand and forgive me, but I would not be able to live with myself knowing I had hurt her. She loves my father, perhaps more than all of us.:_

Love, loyalty, duty... all of these were reasons to set aside his own wishes, though he missed Jane as intensely now as he had the day he had left her. He had done his duty to realm and family by bringing his brother (and the tessaract) back with all haste before Loki could find a way to make more mischief, but even as Thor had prepared for battle, even as he had been reassured by the son of Coul that Jane had been made safe, even as he had fought in the human city and then prepared his brother to return home there had been a tiny part of him, a small selfish part, that had wanted to leave it to everyone else and go see her as he had promised he would. It was a temptation, but his father had always said that the mark of a true man is that he rises above his own petty wants and did was was the right thing to do for all. This, naturally, went double for a man who would one day be king. A king must set the needs of his people above himself always, otherwise he became no more than a despot.

_:I cannot let my own desires come before the good of my realm, but even so, I wish there had been a way for me to see Jane_,: Thor thought wistfully.


End file.
